When I began to make some money I really wanted to have a home.

It began to dawn on me that perhaps my country needed me more at home than overseas.

Right around the end of the fifties college students and young people in general began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture and the wild bats flapped out.

Five years ago we were working on a new album when my health began failing.

In fact I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole that something was left out.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

I auditioned for a solo in church and got it. I was about seven and I sang a song called 'Jesus I Heard You Had a Big House' and I remember people standing up at the end and me thinking 'Oh I think I'm going to like this.' That's how it all began. Sounds funny to say you got your start in church but I did.

It all started when my dog began getting free roll over minutes.

That was the day I began cutting classes and returning to TV tapings it ultimately led to a friendship with Johnny O and an increasing fascination and respect for what he did.

I think it's important to have closure in any relationship that ends - from a romantic relationship to a friendship. You should always have a sense of clarity at the end and know why it began and why it ended. You need that in your life to move cleanly into your next phase.

History is full of examples of people who clamp down after they began to enjoy too much freedom. Freedom can lead to instability anarchy and confusion. So there can be a moral counter-revolution.

I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said 'Oh you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.

What we now call 'finance' is I hold an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

Only weeks after Oslo began when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace I argued that a Palestinian society not constrained by democratic norms would be a fear society that would pose a grave threat to Israel.

I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product not a person so I've been going by Yasiin since '99. At first it was just for friends and family but now I'm declaring it openly.